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William T. Stearn Student Essay Prize deadline 30 June 2017

William T. Stearn Student Essay Prize deadline 30 June 2017

The William T. Stearn Student Essay Prize has been instituted in honour of the late William T. Stearn, a scholar whose work contributed much to the field and to this Society.

The Society for the History of Natural History invites submissions to the 2017 William T. Stearn Student Essay Prize Competition. The prize will be awarded to the best original, unpublished, essay in the field of history of natural history. The submission deadline is 30 June 2017.

The competition is open to undergraduate and postgraduate students in full or part-time education. Entry is not limited to members of SHNH. Entries will be considered by a panel of three judges appointed by the Council of the Society. The winner will receive £300 and be offered membership of the Society for one year. The winning essay will normally be published in the Society’s journal Archives of natural history.

Entries must be prepared in conformity with the bibliographic conventions of Archives of natural history, in ‘Guidelines for Authors’. Essays have to be received by the closing date as hard-copy and on CD as stated in Prize Rules: it is not possible to send entries by email.

W. T. Stearn Essay Prize Winners

2016 Lee Raye. Cardiff University. Why was early modern Scotland famous for lynxes?

2015 Etienne Stockland. Columbia University, Phd Candidate in History, 2010-2016. Patriotic natural history and sericultural natural reform in the French enlightenment. Published in Archives of natural history 44 (1): 1-18. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/anh.2017.0410

2014 Matthew Holmes, University of Leeds, PhD student in Food Security in the Biotech Age: The National Institute of Agricultural Botany since 1970. The perfect pest: natural history & the red squirrel in nineteenth-century Scotland. Published in Archives of natural history 42 (1): 113-125. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/anh.2015.0284

2012 Andrea Kennedy, University of Cambridge MPhil student 2011-12. The beauty of Victorian beasts: illustration in Rev. J.G. Wood’s Homes without Hands. Published in Archives of natural history 40 (2): 193-212. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/anh.2013.0168

2009 Stephanie Pfennigwerth, School of English, Journalism and European Languages, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia. ‘The mighty cassowary’: the discovery and demise of the King Island emu. Published in Archives of Natural History37 (1): 74-90. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/E0260954109001661